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Saturday, June 30, 2012

Two Educations

"There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make a living . . . In the complications of modern life and with our increased accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind us to another – namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings."
— James Truslow Adams [1878-1949], circa 1929

Sunday, June 24, 2012

June 2012 Quotations II

"Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable."
~~ Larry Wall

"Everybody knows more than anybody."
~~ Lorrie B. Potters

"There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

"If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money."
~~ advice columnist Abigail Van Buren

"Pain plus time equals humor."
~~ Lenny Bruce [1925-66]

"To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self."
~~ Joan Didion

"An artist is an artist because he is not happy with the world, so he creates his own existence."
~~ Robin Gibb [1949-2012]

"Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"All great change in America begins at the dinner table."
~~ Ronald Reagan [1911-2004]

"Never advise anyone to go to war or to marry."
~~ Spanish proverb

"Forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them more."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"The reason American cities are prosperous is that there is no place to sit down."
~~ Albert J. Tally, in 1924

"Hate-on-the-highway is an institution occupying a high place in our modern civilization . . . The godawful glares that drivers exchange as they pass each other, the mutual hatred between motorist and pedestrian, these manifestations seem to constitute the ultimate in righteous wrath."
~~ H. Allen Smith [1907-76], in 1947

"The last freedom is choosing your attitude."
~~ Viktor Frankl [1905-97]

"The second law of thermodynamics, simply put, is as follows: left to themselves, things tend to go to hell in a handbasket."
~~ columnist Cecil Adams

"Fate takes its cut."
~~ Lord Buckley [1906-60]

"My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating."
~~ Ashley Brilliant

"Trust everyone, but cut the cards."
~~ Anonymous

"The head of my fan club lives under the Hollywood Freeway in a cardboard box."
~~ independent filmmaker John Carpenter

"I've never seen turkey being sold as imitation tofu."
~~ Lorrie B. Potters

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
~~ Clay Shirky

"When in doubt, doubt."
~~ John R. Henderson

"The main quality that sets humans apart from other animals is the human desire to set itself apart from other animals."
~~ Peter Berryman

"Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library."
~~ Barbara Tuchman

"Our whole American way of life is a great war of ideas, and librarians are the arms dealers selling weapons to both sides."
~~ James Quinn

"Life really does go on whether you're enjoying it or not."
~~ Kendall Morse

"Life is not fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."
~~ William Goldman

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
~~ Stephen King

"When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'"
~~ Hilaire Belloc [1870-1953]

"What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?"
~~ Rex Stout [1886-1975]

"In numbers there is quantity."
~~ Richard Connolly

"Data is the plural of anecdote."
~~ U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan [1927-2003]

"No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."
~~ sci-fi author Terry Pratchett

"We have to believe in free will. We've got no choice."
~~ Isaac Bashevis Singer [1902-91]

"It is the nature of emergencies to be inconvenient."
~~ Terri Weiner

"Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket."
~~ Isaac Asimov [1920-92]

"Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is?"
~~ Frank Scully

"When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"Nothing hurts like your own pain."
~~ Silent Era actress Anita Page [1910-2008]

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower [1890-1969], on 16 April 1953

"The fist starves the hand."
~~ Noah benShea

"Beyond a certain amount, money costs too much."
~~ Michael Z. Lewin

"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."
~~ Thomas Berger

"An editor's job is to take something great and make it good."
~~ Kinky Friedman

"Books are like your children. They take nine months to write; the manuscript weighs six pounds and . . . you send them out into the world and hope that some day they'll send back money."
~~ Edna Buchanan

"You are about to be told, again, that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what this country does to its valuable natural resources?"
~~ Utah Phillips [1935-2008], addressing a high school class

"A mushroom cloud has no silver lining."
~~ controversial saying

"There are more important things than money; the only trouble is they all cost money!"
~~ Louis A. Safian

"She used to be a schoolteacher, but she has no class now."
~~ Fred Allen [1894-1956]

"A man's home is his castle. {The house of an Englishman is to him as his castle.}"
~~ Sir Edward Coke [1552-1634]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Thursday, June 21, 2012

News Factoids for April to June 2012

"High oil prices now pose a greater risk to the world economy than even Europe's sovereign debt crisis."
— per Fatih Birol, chief economist at Intl. Energy Agency - in late March 2012

The Economic Policy Institute gathered data from a range of market researchers and found that the profit on Apple's iPhone was $319 per unit, against the sale price of $630 and labor costs in China of $15 per unit. (That cost in China includes payroll, overhead, and profit for Foxconn.)

British Petroleum announced in April that 2011 corporate profits were $25.7 billion – while payments and cleanup in the devastated Gulf have not proceeded according to B.P.'s promises.

In the first year since the B.P. Megaspill Disaster, the crab crop dropped 42% in Louisiana, 37% in Alabama, and 33% in Mississippi; the oyster harvest fell 55% in Louisiana, 34% in Mississippi, and 3% in Alabama; and the shrimp catch declined 52% in Mississippi, 48% in Alabama, and 14% in Louisiana.

The Google Chrome browser reached a market share of 32.8 percent in May, while the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser's share dropped to 31.9 percent; Mozilla's Firefox browser is third with just more than 25% of the market. — per StatCounter

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., the publisher of authors from Mark Twain to J.R.R. Tolkien, sought bankruptcy protection in May to eliminate more than $3 billion in debt.

Investors withdrew $85 billion from U.S. stock mutual funds last year and have pulled more money out than they put in for five years in a row – significant given how many Americans automatically put money in through 401(k) accounts.
— A.P. Business

INVENTIONS OF THE MONTH
artificial soybeans
Tofu Helper™
powdered water (for emergencies)

documentary videos countering Mitt Romney's repeated lies
G.S.T. Steel of Kansas City, Missouri [6:07]
Broken Promises: Romney's Massachusetts Record [4:18]

"A Massachusetts solar company to which Mitt Romney personally delivered a $1.5 million loan when he was governor has gone belly up, leaving him vulnerable to the same 'picking winners and losers' charges that he’s been lobbing at President Obama over Solyndra ... In January 2003, just less than three weeks into his term as governor, Romney handed a check to Konarka executives during a news conference ... One of the other winners announced that day – Evergreen Solar – has already undercut Romney’s Solyndra attacks by filing last year for bankruptcy protection."

A new Gallup poll finds that 46 percent of Americans believe in creationism: that Jehovah created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. [Thus, 46 percent of Americans are irrational idiots – Ed.]

Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Sunday, June 03, 2012

June 2012 Quotations

"You can't tell a book by it's movie."
~~ Broadway producer Louis A. Safian

"Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul."
~~ Walt Whitman [1819-92]

“Out of the mysterious we discover the undiscovered.”
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"I just try to concentrate on concentrating."
~~ Martina Navratilova

"If you don't think too good, don't think too much."
~~ baseball legend Ted Williams [1918-2002]

"You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them."
~~ athlete Michael Jordan

"If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done."
~~ Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]

"The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world."
~~ Leonard Cohen

"Don't be possessed by your possessions."
~~ photographer Lisl Steiner

"Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean."
~~ Goethe [1749-1832]

"A narcissist is someone better looking that you are."
~~ Gore Vidal

"One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk."
~~ novelist Victoria Wolff [1903-92]

"Most human beings are quite likable if you don't see too much of them."
~~ Irish writer Robert Wilson Lynd [1879-1949]

"Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times."
~~ Joan Baez

"The value of an industry is inversely proportional to the number of awards [that] it gives itself."
~~ blogger David Burge

"To be afraid is to act as if the truth were not true."
~~ Bayard Rustin [1912-87]

"Some defeats are only installments to victory."
~~ Jacob Riis [1849-1914]

"Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes, adversity not without many comforts and hopes."
~~ Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626]

"Never think [that] you've seen the last of anything."
~~ Eudora Welty [1909-2001]

"It is very dangerous to get caught without something to read."
~~ Elizabeth Savage

"Nothing recedes like success."
~~ Walter Winchell 1897-1972]

"Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you take it."
~~ Irving Berlin [1888-1989]

"Joy is the simplest form of gratitude."
~~ theologian Karl Barth [1886-1968]

"The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it."
~~ Edith Wharton [1862-1937]

"The more [that] you learn, the less [that] you fear."
~~ British author Julian Barnes

"The most truthful part of a newspaper is the advertisements."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"I'm not trying to PREDICT the future. I'm just trying to PREVENT it."
~~ Ray Bradbury

"The believer is happy; the doubter is wise."
~~ Hungarian proverb

"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believ e, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]

"To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world, since it is experience of life and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind."
~~ Giacomo Leopardi [1798-1837]

"To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood."
~~ George Santayana [1863-1952]

"There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]

"Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty can never have loved mankind."
~~ Nicolas Chamfort [1741-94]

"A grouch escapes so many little annoyances that it almost pays to be one."
~~ Frank McKinney 'Kin' Hubbard [1868-1930]

"A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road."
~~ poet Alexander Smith [1830–67]

"Always behave like a duck: Keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath."
~~ Judge Jacob Braude of Illinois

"Money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus."
~~ Françoise Sagan [1935-2004]

"Familiarity breeds contempt -- and children."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but many of the things [that] they make it easier to do don't need to be done."
~~ TV curmudgeon Andy Rooney [1919-2011]

"Simple is the most sophisticated thing of all."
~~ cookbook author Ina Garten

"If you hear any sinister background music, run like hell."
~~ Carol Cail

"The biggest enemy is tap water."
~~ Robert S. Morrison, Vice Chairman of Pepsi-Co

"Little things come in small packages."
~~ Mrs. Emile Renan

"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
~~ Ani DiFranco

"All television is children's television."
~~ Richard P. Adler

"All things are never equal."
~~ Robert L. Wolke

"Surrounding yourself with dwarfs does not make you a giant."
~~ Yiddish proverb

"They can't break you if you don't have a spine."
~~ cartoonist Scott Adams

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}